IN JANUARY 1967, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who had recently become the first African American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction, went to integrate the swimming pool in the “Senators Only” gym of the Russell Building on Capitol Hill. There he encountered South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and a few other segregationist Southern senators swimming laps. As Brooke recorded in his memoir, Bridging the Divide, Thurmond and the other defenders of Jim Crow welcomed him into the pool without any apparent hesitation or ill will. He found this curiously disappointing. “I felt that if a senator truly believed in racial separatism I could live with that,” Brooke recalled, but it became evident to him that segregationists like Thurmond “played on bigotry purely for political gain. They appealed to ignorance and prejudice to entrench themselves in office.”